An ox can technically be a cow or a bull too, in a pinch And in more ancient farming cultures that hadn't bred animals as extensively as in later years, the distinction between working animals and meat animals wasn't nearly so sharp
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Especially with ancient China not being much of a dairy culture (lactose intolerance being much more common) compared to Europe or India And the original 牛 they kept were probably water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) not Bos taurus It's a whole complicated thing
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Anyway the English translations seem to be trying to pick the more masculine word for the animal whenever possible, although I guess they picked "Ox" instead of "Bull" because "Bull" was TOO masculine
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Like, ranchers only keep intact bulls around at all for stud purposes and no one wants to be thinking about that Then again, that's also generally the only reason people keep roosters around, but they had fewer good choices for how to translate "chicken"
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Anyway the zodiac sign really is just "cow", not "ox", "pig", not "boar", "chicken", not "rooster" What I find most interesting is 羊, "caprid", which we don't have a common word for in English
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There are two famous kinds of domesticated caprid - sheep and goats And the problem is in our culture sheep and goats have almost exactly opposite cultural connotations Hell the Bible has a parable to that effect
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So whether the translator picks "Sheep" or "Goat" as the name of the zodiac sign is this whole fraught thing, a typical Westerner will have very different reactions to either one I think you can safely call this the result of Christian religious influence
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Although, yes, there's plenty of other species the word 羊 applies to, like antelope, Ibex, musk ox, etc
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Replying to @arthur_affect
Huh. Is rabbit just rabbit? Tiger just tiger? (Is there a good place to read about this?)
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Replying to @TheWeaseKing
I mean yeah 兔 is technically leporids in general - rabbits and hares - but we loosely talk about both of those as "rabbits" in English too
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虎 is pretty narrowly understood to mean just the immediate relatives of the tiger - the words for "lion", "jaguar", etc are different Because, well, big cats aren't very common animals and the tiger was the only one the ancient Chinese were directly familiar with
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